Schizonauts Playtesting on the Horizon

Tomorrow I’ll be running a playtest of Schizonauts up at a local apartment con “AdamCon”. A week later, I’ll be running another one at DexCon (on Thursday, I think).

As a part of this, I’ve been putting together a rules summary “sheet” for the game. Yep, it’s official — my game is very rules-y. I could probably pare this thing down, but it’s already looking to be three pages and change — not shocking that a 38 page game with several structured phases might need 3-4 pages to summarize, but all the same I still worry that it’s too rules-y. That said, I don’t know entirely how to achieve the effects I want to achieve without the “strong rules” implementation.

Playtests will have to be what teach me whether this is an unresolvable gut feeling, a gut feeling in error, or something that I need to spend a few years working on to get into a lighter but still successful form.

While I’m fretting, I’m not actually deeply worried — in part because during the development of Schizonauts, I got a chance to at least run one playtest of it which was actually fairly successful. So this new round of playtests is more a test of tweaks than of major rules … though the major rules still need a work-out beyond the first.It’s possible that what I’m struggling with more is the ability to summarize the rules succinctly, rather than the rules themselves.

Gah. :)

Edit: I’ve now spent the better portion of my evening writing the summary.  That’s the problem when you produce your most rules-intense design to date; condensing the sonofabitch is hard.  It ended up the full four pages long, and not in a big font size either.  Doubtless I could have saved half a page by being a little less wordy, but with two playtests in the next week, I needed to make it go on the page however it would go.  I just wish it hadn’t taken as many hours as it did.

The result is here: http://www.evilhat.com/lab/schizonauts-summary-of-play.pdf